hair

I think all art is making things up, otherwise it’s just photography, or history or something. Two things that are certainly not art are science and math because they admit of only one truth, you are either right or wrong, the way Michael Weber and a few other of our nerdy group thought way back in 8th grade of Tonti School. What makes it confusing is sometimes scientists or mathematicians speak of a theory that is beautiful, but they don’t mean beautiful the same way as an artist or a poet does, well who ever knows what a poet means by anything? Only thing worse than a poet, is a philosopher.

I’ll be sending my address for Beagle’s greatest hits. Strange, your name so close to the Beatles and of the Eagles, and yet, to my knowledge, you never had a gold record.

About the draft lottery. When Nixon began winding down the war, not everybody was getting drafted anymore. But you never knew if you were going to get drafted or not. You were eligible, I don’t remember, like five years, and maybe you would be drafted and maybe you wouldn’t, so not knowing made it hard to plan out your life. So what Nixon did was set up a lottery so each birthday was associated with a number, and if you had a low one, you were going, and if you had a high one, you weren’t, and if you were in the middle you couldn’t be sure either way.

I was already doing my CO so it didn’t make any difference to me. But it kind of divided the draft eligible types because some knew they weren’t going no matter what, and they weren’t so against the war as they had been when they thought they were going to have to fight it.

It’s kind of a funny thing. We hippies thought the establishment wanted to draft us into the army. They were always so gleeful about us sitting there in all our hirsute glory, and the barber comes by and zip, we are shorn, and we aren’t hippies anymore, we are just draftees, and we have to take orders from the very epitome of the establishment, the drill sergeant.

In retrospect, it wasn’t anything personal, they only wanted someone to fight the war. If they could get volunteers to do it, they would rather do it that way, the same as ROTC didn’t want to be compulsory.

But what about that hair, what was so important about that to us? I shall be thinking about that.